Ray of the Star (6 page)

“T
hey’re quite right,” said Alfonso once they were installed in an appealingly deep burgundy booth in the back of a nearby café and had tall, lime-garnished glasses of chilled sparkling water before them, “The connoisseurs are blunt, but they know what they’re talking about, as of course they should since they’ve been monitoring the statues on the boulevard for over fifty years,”

“That long,” said Harry,

“I know,” said Alfonso,

“But why?”

“It’s a pastime like any other, but the point is they always get it right,”

“Has anyone ever ignored them?”

“Of course, but with dire consequences, we’re all very loyal to them, as they are to us, once they’ve decided we merit their attentions,”

“What sort of attentions?”

“A coin or bill here and there to make sure our hats get filled, a bottle of water placed in the shade of our boxes on a hot day, a story to entertain us or make us think when traffic is low or we are or both, a wedge of cheese or sausage when they think we could use it, an antihistamine when a cold or allergy sinks its teeth into us,”

“All that,” said Harry,

“And more,” said Alfonso, “Once they sent a number of us on a cruise, covered all expenses, draped us, as we embarked, in spangles, pearls, pins, earrings, bracelets, rebates, furs, masks, laces, tiffanies, ruffs, and falls, sent us six hours out to sea where, on an island of verdant lawns and rippling brooks and long, splendid beaches, we were regaled at such great length and so splendidly, by hosts who seemed to intuit our every desire, no matter how sunken below the surface of our external commodities, that we didn’t dare sleep for fear of missing even a moment of the happiness that was everywhere to be had, and when we returned we hoisted the connoisseurs high on our shoulders and, cheering, carried them up and down the boulevard until it was time to get back to work,”

“Really?” said Harry,

“More or less,” said Alfonso,

“Then it’s hopeless,”

“I didn’t quite say that, but yes, it is, the boulevard is for serious statues and for serious clowns, again I don’t wish to give offense, but you’re just a man standing around in a costume, who sweats copiously and moves when he shouldn’t, in short you lack the calling,”

“I thought maybe with some practice …” said Harry,

“It would take years, it took me years, I went to school for it, basic stuff, juggling invisible apples and getting myself in and out of invisible glass boxes,” Alfonso said and made his hands climb backwards up an imaginary flight of steps that ran from the sugar bowl to the mirror above the burgundy seatback behind him, a feat that Harry tried and failed miserably to duplicate,

“No, I don’t think so,” said Alfonso, not at all unkindly,

“It’s just that,” said Harry,

“You’re hoping to impress someone,” said Alfonso,

“A woman, an angel,” said Harry,

“Ah,
the
angel,” said Alfonso,

“I just want to talk to her,”

“And perhaps get to know her a little and take a walk together and so on,”

“Exactly,”

“Of course, my friend, of course, it’s in the nature of things,”

“She and I have something in common,”

“I don’t doubt it, and I don’t want to make light of your feelings or make fun, but I will permit myself to say that in your admiration for the angel you are neither, as the old expression goes, the first nor will you be the last, though if your goal is to approach and be noticed by her, favorably noticed that is, I’m quite certain your woeful Don Quixote getup won’t help you,”

“You’re as blunt as the connoisseurs,” said Harry,

“Have you attempted to speak to her?”

“Not directly,”

“Wise decision, the last time she returned someone’s compliment the results were disastrous,”

“Disastrous?” Harry said, taking a deep sip of his sparkling water and pressing on the wedge of lime with his tongue, the resultant burst of tartness helping to check the momentary feeling of panic that had swept over him when Alfonso had used that word—which word, perhaps for emphasis, perhaps because he had seen and enjoyed the reaction it had caused in Harry, Alfonso used again, then he said,

“Do you have time for another water? if you do I’ll tell you a story, about the silver angel and how she came to have those tears on her face,”

“I have time,” Harry said,

“It was told to me—as I suspect, since it seems to be common knowledge on the boulevard, it was told to all the others—by the connoisseurs, and I will do my best to use their language and euphemisms in retelling it to you, although of course what you hear will by necessity differ in some hopefully small degree from what they told me,”

“Is what they told you true?” asked Harry,

“True enough, true enough, and if it isn’t then at least you will have heard a story, shall we order another round?”

“That will be fine,” Harry said.

“O
nce upon a time there was or there wasn’t a young woman named Solange who lived in a fine old city by the sea, and each day in that city she painted her face with gold and put on golden robes and wings and went and stood on the boulevard, which is famous the world round for its fine buildings and fine trees and crowds of people, but most of all for its extraordinary living statues, of which Solange, the golden angel, was the most beautiful and the most beloved, for when she smiled the sun slipped out of her mouth and danced in front of the crowds that would gather around her in such numbers that the boulevard was blocked and people seeking passage spilled out onto the surrounding streets, and while young men and young women alike fell hopelessly in love with Solange, and spoke to her and beseeched her to step down off her box, she never answered, never even seemed to look at them, until the day that the sun, having slipped out of her mouth to dance around in the crowd, stopped before a young man, who reached out a long, dusky finger and caressed it, as if it were a cheek,
my cheek,
thought Solange on her golden box, and when a moment later this young man came and stood before her and asked her to step down and join him for a drink, she shocked everyone (the murmur of it, which I remember well, rippled like electric wavelets all the way down the boulevard) by stepping down and removing her wings and walking off with him, and although Solange and the young man were often out and about in the days and weeks that followed it was as if they had pulled on magical cloaks that kept anyone from seeing them clearly, so that when they had been somewhere and then left it was like a dream had come, glowed for a moment, then gone, so love begins, and, in truth, ends, even when it ends so horribly, as Solange’s did, one night when her young man had gone out in search of milk and ended his search with a knife blade broken off so far down his throat it took the investigating officials several hours to discover the cause of death, though it did not take them so long to find the one who had broken his knife off in the young man’s mouth: after the deed he had drunk a bottle of sparkling water, swallowed a sprig of parsley and a fistful of Valium and went out to inform anyone who would listen that the golden angel, whom he had admired for far longer than the young man, would soon be his and his alone, without knowing that at the precise moment he had shoved his knife blade down the young man’s throat the golden angel had ceased to exist, for when, some weeks later, Solange reappeared on the boulevard, she was no longer golden—she had gone as pale as a piece of cloudy ice—and she never smiled, and there were tears on her face, and inside those tears, which she carefully affixed each morning and tore carefully from her face each night, were flecks of the broken blade, which the presiding coroner, who knew her from the boulevard, had given her out of pity, along with a piece of milk-stained cloth, when, after the young man’s family had swooped down and swept everything up, she had presented herself and asked in a clear, brittle voice if there was anything left from his final moments that she could have.”

W
hen Alfonso had finished his story, harry excused himself, went to the restroom, locked himself in a booth, and threw up, and for a long time he stood there taking shallow breaths and wiping his mouth and forehead with squares of toilet paper until he realized that by doing so he was turning them gold, the color of the story, or at any rate one of its colors—blood red and death-metal silver being the others—and this thought reminded him that there were several follow-up questions he would like to ask Alfonso and that there would be more than enough time later to swim out into the icy depths of his own sea of sorrows, in which, midway through Alfonso’s account, he had found himself submerged, but when, after he had splashed water on the smeary makeup still covering parts of his face and straightened his hair, he got back to the table, Alfonso was gone and the booth had been occupied by a pair of teenage girls dressed like latter-day fans of the Bay City Rollers, one of whom, almost without looking up, handed him a napkin on which had been scrawled an address, a time later that evening, and the letter “A,” which made Harry think of the great tale by Hawthorne, though not, or only fleetingly, of the question of adultery, but rather of the novel’s deep forests filled with dense brush and gnarled trees and fallen leaves and drifts of snow and the bones of the animals and humans who had fallen there, not necessarily happily, perhaps even with their hands clasped and their heads cast heavenward, filling the empty sky with their useless piety and despair, much like, he thought with a dull shudder, his own gestures at a certain juncture, and here he still the fuck was, just like the knife-metal angel, who had once been a golden angel, whose name was Solange, who was still beautiful, even with her face broken and cast in shadow,
Solange,
he thought, whereupon two images floated like dead leaves down through his mind and landed one on top of the other, the first, of Solange, standing now farther away than ever from him on her box with the bits of metal on her face, and the other of the two of them somehow walking arm and arm along the shore, and, it seemed to him, if those thoughts could sit so close together, couldn’t he, somehow, find a way to step across the inconsequential divide: perhaps, perhaps not: though, yes, really what a fool he had been to put on his paint and plastic armor and stand out in the sun and hope to be noticed by her: even if the great Don might well have done just that, he, Harry, was no great Don, he was just a sad sack from a distant country attempting, halfway around the world, some ontological equivalent of the Humpty Dumpty story, which of course ended in emphatic confirmation of its own disaster, in spite of the neat rhyme, “Fuck Humpty Dumpty,” he said, and although he went to the trouble of extricating his duffel bag from under the table and the really quite absurdly dressed teenage girls, it was only to carry it out of the café and, with a sharp swing and hard kick, abandon it on the sidewalk outside.

T
he dead leaves that fell through Harry’s head in the café were of the same species as the ones that had been falling all that day through Doña Eulalia’s as she lay shivering under heavy quilts, attending to what she was convinced was a light fever but probably wasn’t—she had been a life-long hypochondriac—so that when, here and there, the letter “A” began appearing among the falling bits of gold and brown and red, followed by a series of, admittedly, barely visible L’s, F’s, S’s, N’s, and O’s, it took her quite some time to notice it, though when a golden horse holding a spear galloped through the downpour she sat straight up, threw off her quilts, reached for her phone and called Ireneo, who answered on the first ring, but in a hushed voice, so that she could barely hear him when he said,

“I am at my mother’s bedside, Madame,”

“Ah, and how is your mother?”

“She is gravely ill, Madame,”

“I’m terribly sorry to hear it, such a shame,”

“Yes, it is distressing, Madame,”

“What do you call those horses with human heads?”

“Madame?”

“Greek mythology, devilish things,”

“Centaurs, Madame, but you must forgive me, my mother …”

“Yes of course, I’m so sorry, go and see the centaur on the boulevard, the golden one, his name is Alfonso, he can tell you where to look,”

“It may be some days before I can return to the city to carry on my search, Madame,”

“Then you must go and look the moment you have returned,”

“I will, Madame, good-bye,”

“Just as soon as you have returned, make a note of it, Ireneo, and convey my best wishes to your mother, the poor woman, good-bye,” said Doña Eulalia, who emitted a loud “bollocks!” as soon as she had shut her phone, and for a moment she considered asking one of the others to run the errand, but they were all—these relatives of hers—useless, not much better than the mannequins on rollers she had them drag around on the nights she had her clients over, a scheme Ireneo, the only one not related to her, had helped her come up with in order to double the number of lamps and faces—those brief, bright pools of mystery—present at her consultations, without having to reach further beyond the unpaid ranks of her family, all of whom worked for her gratis, in expectation of an inheritance … no, it would have to be Ireneo, and she would have to wait, she thought there was still time, “but time for what?” she asked herself as she climbed back into bed, covered herself, reached for a thermometer, looked for the leaves to see if anything else was galloping around in them, found that her head was empty, said, “bollocks!” again, and promptly fell asleep.

W
hich was just what Ireneo, who had been more or less awake since he had arrived some days previously, wished he could do, but every time his head began to loll his mother, who had a platoon of servants at her command but wanted only him, would moan as if on cue, and Ireneo’s hand would go out and damp her forehead with a washcloth or squeeze a little water between her lips, and when, in a faltering, unenthusiastic voice she would ask him to sing, he would produce warbling, incomplete versions of songs she had taught him during his boyhood and made him perform, in a wig and short pants, along with a few poorly executed dance steps, in front of her employees at the factory during Christmas parties, while his father, who had drunk himself to death before Ireneo had turned ten, gazed on in poorly concealed disgust, a look which years later had found its echo on his mother’s face when he had told her he had no interest in taking up a position in her company, and that, instead, he had decided to go “into the occult,” a field in which if one sold one’s soul at least it was on one’s own terms, and which, if less remunerative, had significant and lasting rewards, a stance that Ireneo had continued to maintain, even though, thus far, his role remained a supporting one, after all even now as he sat by his mother’s bed the old running shoes, which he had gone so far as to sleep (if not bathe) in, continued to give off promising sparks of import that he very much looked forward to being able, again, to give his full attention to, in the way, as he saw it, Doña Eulalia paid attention to the bits and pieces of information that came to her, at all hours of the day and night, which focus allowed her, most of the time, to make something like sense out of not very much at all, a skill that Harry, a few hours later, would have been very happy to have had a little of, as against his better judgment, he negotiated the gray and violet streets of the pre-dawn city on his way to Alfonso’s, while at the same time continuing to think of the young woman on the plane with her book on the Black Dahlia, the man with his new golf balls, Señora Rubinski, Ireneo, Doña Eulalia with the lamp on her head, the connoisseurs, Alfonso, Solange, the young man with the knife blade in his throat, all of which had seemed to him, as he drank glass after glass of sparkling water at his kitchen table and watched the clock hands tick ever closer to this ridiculously awkward hour, like so many inexplicable blocks of ice bumping against each other on the black water that, since hearing the story of the silver angel, he had off and on been doing a dog-paddle in, any one of which he would have gladly clambered onto and taken his chances on, not least the one that corresponded to Señora Rubinski and Señora Rubinski’s dead husband, whom the excellent lady had, that very evening upon his return from the café, described as they stood a moment together on the sidewalk as a most marvelous and thoughtful individual, one with whom one “always had the very best chances of passing an agreeable moment,” an image that had touched Harry greatly, with the result that he had remained out on the sidewalk with Señora Rubinski for quite some time indeed, so long in fact that when Señora Rubinski announced with a sigh and a shake of her head that her husband, “a bit of a lazybones,” must have fallen asleep on the couch, and that she would have to go and wake him, even though it was now far too late for them to begin their customary walk, Harry was able to offer her his arm and escort her to the elevator and, as tears began to drip down her cheeks, hand her the stray makeup-removal cloth that was still neatly folded in his front pocket, which she very elegantly used to dab at the corners of her eyes then, with a slight bow, returned to him, and as he had climbed the stairs to begin waiting to go see Alfonso, it seemed very nearly certain to him that despite the leaning of his spirits of late, Señora Rubinski’s tears were about to have company, that they could not help but have company, and that this would be a good thing, for it had been a very long time, but the only tears in Harry’s apartment that night were Señora Rubinski’s, and of course in spite of the sparkling water that Harry found he could not stop drinking and the horrible black water it seemed to him he kept slipping below the surface of, before long the cloth that had contained them was completely dry.